"Room
Rain"
Interactive Environmental Design Product
Helping the Visually Impaired "See"
Architecture
Description
Physical spaces are intuitively communicated to visually impaired individuals.
"Room Rain" adds audible intelligence to public or private architectural
spaces. Features of a room (walls, doors, furniture, elevators, etc.)
are intuitively communicated in a one-second background sweep of sequenced
sounds.
User
Scenario
To try the system you keep your eyes closed and enter an unfamiliar lobby,
the security guard by the door says "Welcome, this lobby and building
is 'Room Rain' equipped, may I hand you a Room Rain remote?" You
respond "Please, thank you..." and she hands you a little plastic
box, the size of a pack of cigarettes. Your fingers feel a wide and thin
metal clip, cool to the touch—like a garage door opener. You clip
it onto the waist of your pants, and press the large button. In a mere
second's time, you've heard a single moving point of sound travel the
contours of the room, circle the door, table, and chairs, making your
immediate physical space audibly perceptible to you in a single second's
sonic gestalt, across a hundred tiny speakers.
Inspiration
"Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws
a colored blanket over previously invisible things... The rain gives a
sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the
world to another... I f only rain could fall inside a room, it would help
me to understand where things are in that room."
- John M. Hull, in "Touching the Rock, an Experience of Blindness"
System
Prototype consists of 100-foot ribbon cable with small speakers located
every 2 feet. Powered by a transistor radio battery, each segment is entirely
self-contained (controlled by a network of embedded PIC microprocessors).
The system is inexpensive, modular, and can include any number of additional
segments via infrared emitter/receivers. A single "master" micro-controller
holds a map of the space, and runs the network per instructions received
from a user's handheld remote control. [Collaboration with Dorey Edinger]